“And Grace punched a guy,” Joaquin told them.
“You sure you don’t want to rethink that ‘fine’ statement?” Linda asked, just as Mark said, “Grace punched a guy? She looks like the human equivalent of a kitten.”
Joaquin had no idea what that meant, but he decided not to ask. Sometimes Mark’s brain worked in weird, creative ways. “I guess someone at school said something bad about her family, so she clocked them.”
Later that night, though, when he was upstairs in his room, Joaquin regretted what he had said. Not the part about Grace, but the part where he’d told his sisters that he knew how to punch. Maybe Linda and Mark would think he was violent now. Maybe they would wonder why he was even capable of throwing a punch in the first place.
Joaquin hadn’t actually been in a fistfight before. But he had lived with a family when he was ten—two foster sisters, an older biological one, and Joaquin. The mom was an executive assistant in Long Beach and the dad was an amateur boxer. At first, Joaquin had worried about the potential ramifications of having a fighter in the family, but the dad had been really nice. He would even show Joaquin how to punch the bag that hung in the garage, which was too packed with stuff to park any cars in it.
“Like this,” he said to Joaquin one afternoon, and had tucked his thumb carefully around Joaquin’s small hand so that it was a perfect, solid fist. “Now hit the bag. Hit it hard.”
Joaquin had punched, hard. He suspected that the foster dad just liked having a son to do things with (the girls weren’t interested in punching things in the dusty garage, apparently). The home had been pretty good, too, one of his best, but then one of the social workers had figured out that they had too many kids for the square footage of the house, and because Joaquin had been the last one in, he was the first one to go out.
That’s when he had ended up at the Buchanans’.
Joaquin had learned a lot of things in his seventeen years. One of the things that came from moving from family to family was that he learned how to adapt, how to change his colors like a chameleon so that he could blend in to his surroundings. He always hoped that if he did the correct things, said the correct things, no one would realize that he was a foster kid. Everyone—neighbors, people at school, the person who bagged their groceries—would just think that he was one of the bio kids, as permanent as blood, someone who could never be traded in, swapped out, sent away.
So he had learned boxing from one family. He also knew how to make great chocolate chip cookies and loaves of bread from when he lived with the family whose dad was a pastry chef at a fancy restaurant in Los Angeles. Another mom taught him calligraphy, and then he had an older foster brother who was super into early punk music and used to greet Joaquin at the door holding an album and saying, “Wait until you listen to this.” Joaquin had loved the attention. Not so much the music, though. It jangled his nerves.
He didn’t mind adapting like that. It felt like hopping from stone to stone, picking up tricks of the trade along the way, leveling up on his way to the final battle. He would watch the families to see if they waited to say grace before dinner, if they put their napkins in their laps and kept their elbows off the table. Whatever they did, Joaquin did it, too.
It was when people assumed that he didn’t know things that he got upset. He still remembered one foster mother, an older woman who had smelled like cloyingly sweet powder, like someone had pulverized rose petals and sprinkled them on her clothes. She had crouched down in front of Joaquin upon his arrival at her house, smiled with her yellowing teeth, and said, “Do you know what iced tea is, sweetheart?”
Joaquin knew immediately that she’d asked him that because he looked Mexican. He knew that tone of voice, the slow speech in case he didn’t understand English (like speaking more slowly would somehow be more effective), the assumption behind the question that he had never experienced something as basic as iced fucking tea before. When he had nodded and said, “Yes,” she had seemed almost disappointed, like someone else had planted their flag in Joaquin before she could get the chance.
Since that day, Joaquin had hated iced tea.
That night at dinner, both Mark and Linda kept glancing at each other. Joaquin felt like he was watching a tennis match, glancing back and forth between both of them.
He finally couldn’t take it anymore.
“What?” he said, spearing a piece of broccoli with his fork. (At Mark and Linda’s, Joaquin had adapted to eating vegetables at every meal. Broccoli and spinach were fine; brussels sprouts were death, even when they were cooked in butter.)
“What what?” Mark replied, mostly because that was their routine.
“You keep looking at each other,” he said, gesturing with his fork at them. “Something’s up.”
Mark and Linda looked at each other again.
“See?” Joaquin said.
Linda smiled at that. “We just wanted to talk to you about what we discussed last month.”
Joaquin set his fork down and readjusted his napkin. (In his lap.) “Oh,” he said.
Mark cleared his throat. That’s how Joaquin knew he was nervous. Mark had all sorts of tells, but that was a big one. “We just wanted to know if you had had time to think about it. We know this has been a busy month for you, what with finding Maya and Grace and getting to know them.”
“But,” Linda quickly added, “we’re fine with waiting if you need more time to think about it. We don’t want to pressure you at all, sweetheart.”
Joaquin had thought about it so much that he didn’t think there was any possible way to have new thoughts about it.
“I’m still thinking,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
Mark cleared his throat again. Linda tried not to look hopeful, but she didn’t have much success at hiding the expression that flitted across her face.
Joaquin thought about Grace defending her family, about Maya’s parents splitting up, her dad moving out. “I have a question,” he said.
Mark and Linda sat up at the same time like nervous rabbits, their ears pricking up. “Of course,” Mark said. “We imagined you would. You know we’re always here to answer questions if you need it.”
“And we’ll answer them truthfully,” Linda added. She knew that was important to him.
“Okay,” Joaquin said slowly, sitting back in his chair. “So if I say no, that I don’t want to be adopted, do I have to leave?”
Linda seemed to wilt, while Mark looked like one of those helium balloons that Joaquin had gotten from a birthday party when he was seven. He had been so excited to bring it home and keep it, but the next day it was sunken and deflated, almost to the ground. Seeing Mark that way made Joaquin feel as bad as when he had woken up and seen the balloon.